Page 117 - Culture Society and the Media

MESSAGES AND MEANINGS 107
‘law and order’ problem pulling discrete and local events into an amplification
spiral and registering them all within a discourse of ‘law and order’.
The thesis put forward in Policing the Crisis raises certain problems in relation
to the siting of signifying systems within a Marxist theory of ideology. It is clear
that the autonomy of media significations within the argument is very limited.
Basically, the media serve, in the specific historical conditions analysed, to
reproduce and reinforce ‘primary definitions’. They are assumed thereby to
signify a crisis which already exists for the primary definers, a crisis already in
operation in the realm of politics and economics. Moreover, given this view of
the operations of the media, it is difficult to see how the media operate as ‘a field
of ideological struggle’. Since the news is read as ‘the media’ and the news is
characterized by its reproduction of primary, ‘dominant’ definitions in a
consensual form, struggle, along with those primary definitions, would seem to
lie outside this area of media signification. The area of ‘struggle’ or opposition
would seem to lie in Policing the Crisis, insofar as it lies anywhere, in the areas
of class experience and the cultural forms through which men and women live
that experience; but those cultural forms are largely neglected in favour of the
focus on ‘news’. Some of the difficulties present in Policing the Crisis
undoubtedly stem from the attempted synthesis of this form of Marxist
culturalist theory, inflected through Gramsci, with an Althusserian conception of
the media as an ideological state apparatus largely concerned with the
reproduction of dominant ideologies and with an attempt to recognize the
autonomy and specificity of the media. With this kind of multiple ‘grafting’
going on, it is not entirely surprising that some shoots do not flourish. In this
case, attention to the internally ordered characteristics of the media suffers, since
the media is conceived of as representing ‘reality’ in a manner inflected in the
interests of dominant groups. In effect a sophisticated version of the notion of ‘false
consciousness’ is proposed; ‘by consenting to the view of the crisis which has
won credibility in the echelons of power, popular consciousness is also won to
support too the measures of control and containment which this version of social
reality entails’ (Hall et al, 1978, p. 221).
Semiology or structuralism and in particular the semiological analysis of
media texts have been woven into various formulations of a theory of ideology
with a range of subsequent problems in the internal coherence of such theories. It
is through the endless thinking through of this kind of incoherence, that
intellectual work proceeds. The problems raised in the texts discussed here
indicate the general difficulty of reconciling semiotics with any theory of
ideology which conceives of the media as essentially reflecting the ‘real’. Yet the
treatment of systems of signification as autonomous, not bound in a relationship
of reflection or representation to an external reality, does not exclude
relationships of articulation between different forms of signification nor does it
necessarily exclude the analysis of the determinations of signifying systems.
Indeed, an effective theory of signification would necessarily involve examining
the overall pattern of signifying systems and the configuration of ideological